RAISE 2020, India’s mega AI event, was officially inaugurated earlier this evening with a bevy of attendees and a star-studded panel of keynote speakers. At 7 pm IST, screens across the world crackled alive with the images of some of the brightest minds and tallest leaders in governance and technology today.

With an effusive welcome by Amitabh Kant, CEO of Niti Aayog, Dr Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM took centrestage to deliver the first keynote. Krishna, who took over as IBM’s CEO in April this year, said AI is the biggest technology of our time. Data will be core to this new revolution, and AI will be infused into a slew of software products and services.

Adding that AI presents a massive $15 trillion opportunity, it can specifically improve livelihoods of millions of Indians. He spoke of IBM’s collaboration with the government of Karnataka and Niti Aayog to drive precision agriculture for the state’s farmers, to enable sharper and nuanced decision making. He said that this project was entirely developed by software engineers and technical minds in India. He added that AI can have a profound impact on education by bridging the gap in student-teacher ratio. India, with its immense pool of developers, entrepreneurs, startups and scientists is well poised to bring about monumental changes – the success of UPI’s 1 billion transactions, and Direct Bank Transfer Services (DBTS) have shown the exponential growth of digital in India.

Krishna then went on to reveal that IBM is opening an AI Center of Excellence with GeM (government e-marketplace), enabling efficiency in public procurement.

AI needs to be done right, he stated, and while right now the global capability on this is only at 4%, it has to be further driven by data, trust and skills. He outlined IBM’s initiative Stem4Girls, which is on a mission to enable 200,000 girls to code by 2022; and their collaboration with CBSE to introduce AI learning modules in more than 200 schools across India.

He signed off this sharp keynote with this profound statement:

Artificial Intelligence, along with hybrid cloud and very soon, quantum computing, will propel India as a premier AI destination.

Register for RAISE 2020 here